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Friday, November 18, 2016

Metal Detector Discoveries

The "Boot of Cortez" is one of the most unusual gold nuggets in the world, and at 389.4 troy ounces it is the largest surviving placer nugget discovered in the Western Hemisphere.

The nugget was found in the Mexican Sonora Desert near the Arizona border in 1989. It was found by a local prospector using a metal detector he bought at Radio Shack. The nugget sold for $1.8m at auction in Dallas in 2008.

In October 2012, a novice treasure hunter who bought a basic metal detector returned to the shop in Hertfordshire weeks later, clutching part of England's finest ever hoard of Late Roman gold coins.

When David Booth bought a metal detector in 2008, he was looking for a new hobby. But on his first outing with the device, he uncovered a £1 million hoard of Iron Age jewellery that is Scotland’s most important find in a century.

Booth found four gold necklaces – known as ‘torcs’ – buried six inches beneath the surface in a field near Stirling.

The Frome Hoard is a hoard of 52,503 Roman coins found in April 2010 by Dave Crisp near Frome in Somerset, England.

The coins were contained in a ceramic pot and date from AD 253 to 305.

The Staffordshire Hoard is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found. On July 5, 2009 Terry Herbert was searching an area of recently ploughed farmland near Hammerwich, Staffordshire with a metal detector and found the treasure. Over the next five days, enough objects were recovered from the soil to fill 244 bags.

Eventually over 3500 items were recovered.

An amateur prospector discovered a huge gold nugget with an estimated value of more than $300,000 in Australia's Victoria state in 2013.

The nugget weighing 177 ounces, or 5.5 kilograms was unearthed with a metal detector just outside Ballarat in a popular area for prospecting.

Three-year-old James Hyatt was out for an afternoon walk with his dad in Essex, England in 2010. He was taking a turn with the detector when he discovered a one-inch pendant featuring engravings of the Virgin Mary clutching a cross along with “the five wounds of Christ,” believed to date from the 16th century.

Likely worn by royalty, the rare 16th century gold reliquary pendant was used to hold religious relics.

A month after Nick Davies bought his metal detector in 2009, he found the largest collection of Roman coins in recent British history. The estimated 10,000 coins date to the reign of Constantine I. The coins are all bronze and silver-washed bronze nummi, and date to the period between AD 313 and 335.

When a neighbor showed 7-year-old Lucas Hall his collection of Civil War–era bullets found on his Virginia property using a metal detector, the boy became instantly hooked. One week after Hall received a detector for his birthday he found a cavalry sword ... described as an 1840 or 1860 lightweight saber.